If the idea that time stems from the second law is true, and we apply the principle of eliminating variables that are redundant because they don't make any difference, we can collapse the notions of time and entropy into one thing. Under these assummptions, in a universe where entropy is decreasing (relative to our external notion of 'time'), the internal 'time' is in fact running backward.
As also noted by some other commenters, it seems to me that the expressed conditional dependence of different points in a universe is in some way equivalent to increasi...
First¸ I didn't read all of the above comments, though I read a large part of it.
Regarding the intuition that makes one question Pascals mugging: I think it would be likely that there was a strong survival value in the ancestral environment to being able to detect and disregard statements that would cause you to pay money to someone else without there being any way to detect if these statements were true. Anyone without that ability would have been mugged to extinction long ago. This makes more sense if we regard the origin of our builtin utility function...
As another datapoint (though I don't have sources), I heard that among evangelical church leaders you also find a relatively higher proportion of engineers.
Might it be that engineering teaches you to apply a given set of rules to its logical conclusion, rather than questioning if those rules are correct? To be a suicide bomber, you'd need to follow the rules of your variant of religion and act on them, even if that requires you to do something that goes against your normal desires, like kill yourself.
I'd figure questioning things is what you learn as a scientist, but apparently the current academic system is not set up to question generally accepted hypotheses, or generally do things the fund providers don't...
There's nothing in being a rationalist that prevents you from considering multiple hypotheses. One thing I've not seen elaborated on a lot on this site (but maybe I've just missed it) is that you don't need to commit to one theory or the other, the only time you're forced to commit yourself is if you need to make a choice in your actions. And then you only need to commit for that choice, not for the rest of your life. So a bunch of perfect rationalists who have observed exactly the same events/facts (which of course doesn't happen in real life) would ascri...
Extrapolating from Eliezers line of reasoning you would probably find that although you remember ss0 + ss0 = ssss0, if you try to derive ss0 + ss0 from the peano axioms, you also discover it ends up as sss0, and starting with ss0 + ss0 = ssss0 quickly leads you to a contradiction.